


Love you like Math

by orphan_account



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: F/M, Gen, Other
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-09-16
Updated: 2013-09-23
Packaged: 2017-12-26 18:28:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,012
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/968872
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>100 Theme challenge focusing most heavily on Hermann Gottlieb and Vanessa Gottlieb, those insufferable cutiebutts. Features Newt Geiszler, Baby Gottlieb, the extended Geiszler and Gottlieb families, and certain members of the Hong Kong Shatterdome team.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Themes this chapter:  
> 15\. Seeking Solace  
> 20\. My Inspiration  
> 21\. Never Again (Very much inspired by a post on tumblr about those two meeting up after sneaking out of Alison and Vanessa's rooms. >:D)  
> 33\. Seeing Red  
> 79\. Illogical

**15\. Seeking Solace**

There’s something in the way she wraps her arms around his shoulders that… changes him. Not the way he acts, not the way he lives and sleeps and eats and dresses, no, but it settles something inside him.

He doesn’t even need to say anything, doesn’t even need to mention that his father found out about his side project, doesn’t need to say that Lars Gottlieb erased it all and told him it was useless drivel. Doesn’t have to say a word about how his own father told him to go back to doing something useful, like coding the Jaegers.(“Hermann, we are on a deadline we have no time for your foolish hobbies. Get your act together!”) He just arrives at her room at the PPDC academy and grips his cane tighter because… because they’re friendly, certainly, but what’s the point of coming here? What can she possibly do? It’s so very likely that, as so many others have, she’ll tell him no. No, Hermann, I can’t listen, your father is right.

But she doesn’t. She pulls him in the door and curls her arms around his shoulders, feels long fingers brush through the hair on the back of his head, feels carefully manicured nails rest gently along his nape. She presses cool lips to his temple and doesn’t tell him to go talk to his father, no. She doesn’t ask him if he did something to make his father do that, doesn’t ask if he let slip about his project or anything else, no. Just accepts his mumble of ‘My father destroyed my work’ and waits for him to wrap careful arms around her waist before she says anything. And when she does say something, it makes him smile against her neck.

“Your father’s a prick.”

 

**20\. My Inspiration**

One of the first times she stays at his flat in London, she does a little snooping.

Nothing drastic, she doesn’t go delving into deep dark secrets, no, she’s not cruel. She just wants to know what makes him tick a bit better, because his mind fascinates her and surely she can find some insight into the mental world of Hermann Gottlieb.

She goes into his office and finds wall to wall chalkboards, huge ones carefully arranged to take advantage of space and put as many as he can in the office. They cover the windows and leave very little room for the bookshelf wedged next to the door. There is a desk with a lamp, a few filing cabinets, and a laptop sitting on the desk, but the room is all chalkboards. Black and green walls covered in white, streams of equations and code and his particular shorthand all looping and swirling across a series of canvases that remind her of schooldays.

Through a crack in between two dim chalkboards come the first few rays of day, sun motes dancing in between the chilly boards, dust and thumbprints visible on the wooden edges. It is cold in this room but the heat splits through the cracks, and she finds herself thinking even more fondly of Hermann than she did before.

Vanessa curls back into bed with him, whispers and asks why he has so many chalkboards.

“I like to record things with my hands,” he mumbles, still half-asleep. “I take photos and record it all, but it makes more sense to see it in my hands.”

He’s drifting back off to sleep but she reaches over and pulls one hand slowly into hers, sees the calloused ridges along his middle and forefinger where a piece of chalk so often is held.

There is so much poetry in him, and he doesn’t even realize it, and she marvels at that sometimes in the bleak early mornings.

 

**21\. Never Again**

She likes to convince him to try new things.

Most of those things involve new clothes or food, but sometimes…

“Come to my room tonight,” she’ll whisper in the mess hall in Anchorage. “I’ll be waiting.”

And he’s never really been able to say no to her, so… he goes. He slips through the hallways and knocks once on her door, and she pulls him in and showers him with kisses and and roaming hands and all verbal communication flies out the damned window, or it would if there was a window in her room so instead all the words he tries to say get jumbled up and fall to the floor when she pushes him down on the bed and latches onto his neck. His cane is on the floor and he’s just fine with that, really.

When she finally releases him, not that he minded being held captive, she shoos him out the door and whispers that she hopes he doesn’t get caught, because she’s the only one allowed to do that. His neck and ears go bright red and he can hear her snickering behind the door while he tries to straighten his clothes and smooth his hair out, but it’s really a lost cause.

Halfway down the hall back to his room, he almost slams right into Tendo Choi, who has fire engine red lipstick smeared across his collar and his mouth, plus a rather spectacular bruise forming near the tattoo on his neck. Down the corridor Tendo has come from, he knows is the munitions wing.

Hermann imagines he looks no better, though, caught in such a position, with his stretched out shirt collar drooped over his shoulder, his neck marked and hair mussed. Behind him is the engineering quarters and he grips his cane tightly in both hands.

Several terrifying minutes pass as they both attempt to make the proper words arrive, having left their verbal faculties on the floor of two other peoples’ rooms.  Finally, though, at long last, it is Tendo who makes the first move to head back to his quarters, muttering behind him.

“We never speak about this ever again, Doc.”

“Agreed, Officer Choi.”

  
  


**33\. Seeing Red**

 

It’s one of those fancy ballroom parties, the kind with a lot of champagne and a lot of high ranking members of the fashion industry. The kind that is supposed to be about networking, but is really just an excuse for a lot of people to get together and talk bad about the other people in the room.

Vanessa’s been in the fashion industry since she was scouted at the PPDC. They needed a face, they needed a 21st century Rosie the Riveter, and she had been it. Photographed once with grease on her face and elbow deep in a Jaeger’s shoulder, sun reflecting off of the metal and lighting her dark face with it’s sharp cheekbones and arched brows, that one picture had given her a chance at modeling. On a whim, she’d taken it, hoping to use whatever influence it might gain her to get the Jaeger program more funding. It had worked, and it had also gained the PPDC quite a few new recruits. She deeply enjoyed modeling, enjoyed forging her body and her face into a striking work of art and soul.

But she didn’t like the looks she was getting, walking into that party with Hermann on her arm. Hissed criticisms behind hands and whispered wonderings of how much he’s paying her and- suddenly she’s furious and how dare they be so bold as to watch them and JUDGE.

The final straw of the night is a man coming up to her and telling her to ditch the cripple to come have some fun with him, and her vision goes dark before she feels her fist meet the man’s face.

All anyone sees after that is a man with a cane and a dumbfounded look on his face, leaving the party with a wild-eyed woman in a vivid red dress.

 

**79\. Illogical**

For all accounts, deciding to have a baby at the end of the world isn’t their most sane idea.

But, as Vanessa has told him on multiple occasions, crazy ideas are what gave them a fighting chance in the war. Crazy ideas are what he has always been inexplicably drawn to his entire life. (A true Artificial Intelligence, giant mechs… why not add fatherhood to the mix?)

Of course being a father terrifies him, and sometimes he catches sight of the photo of his parents he keeps on his desk, sees Lars Gottlieb with his sour smile and cold eyes… and Hermann is afraid. Hermann is always afraid, these days. Afraid they won’t win, afraid his models will be wrong, afraid they will all die, afraid that when he boards the plane to Hong Kong he won’t see Vanessa again. Logically, it’s a terrible idea, logically, they are trying to create normalcy in a very dismal environment, logically he will probably be a terrible father and he grows sick with fear that he will become like his father and that his child will suffer for it. Plus it’s the end of the world, and the Kaiju attacks are increasing, it’s very likely they won’t make it to 2026.

Logically… Well, logically, Hermann shouldn’t be married to a woman as wonderful as Vanessa, shouldn’t love his work so much when so much hinges on it, shouldn’t have invited Newt Geiszler to his wedding when he claims he hates him, shouldn’t have slammed the door in his father’s face in their last blowout fight…

He’s lived his whole life claiming to be logical and concise and pragmatic, but… Well, he’s done the math, you see.

Every illogical decision he’s ever made has lead him to a remarkable things. And while he can’t 100% pinpoint if it’s logical to follow the pattern of illogical actions leading to positive results… He figures as long as it’s the end, he may as well follow the pattern that percent-wise will lead him to the most positive end results. Despite the fear and the anxiety and the possible end-of-the-world at their doorsteps, despite all of his misgivings and concerns...

Statistically, it’s not illogical at all.

 


	2. 6-10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> 1-Introduction  
> 3-Making History  
> 48-Everyday Magic  
> 81-A Place to Belong (Every now and then Newton might hijack a prompt. :D)  
> 83-Breakfast

**1\. Introduction**

It’s his first week at the Jaeger academy, and he’s up in what has been dubbed Project Brawler Yukon’s control pod, running over coding processors with the lead engineer. Or... What he thinks is the lead engineer. He’s working under his father, but his father largely handles things with the higher-ups, so he’s running with a team of coders and computational engineers.

The man had seemed so official, but no no, Doctor Gottlieb, you have the wrong person. Chief Engineer isn’t in the bay today, Assistant Chief Engineer is who you’re looking for, she’s down at the foot.

"The foot?"

"Ayep, the foot. Gonna have to go down a few levels."

So he does, and he gets directed to the ‘foot’. She’s not so much AT the foot so much as she’s INSIDE the foot, elbow deep in the inner mechanisms of the Jaeger. She’s wearing a jumpsuit and covered in grease, yanking out an angular shaped beam as long as her leg.

“This? This is shoddy workmanship. See how hard it was for me to remove it? In the field, this could gum up all the works. Oil everything, grease it up, tight but not suffocating. It has to be able to move. If a muscle is too tight, all it’s going to do is cramp up! Keep that in mind.” she claps and the crowd around her breaks, allowing her to leap down from the foot and stride across the floor.

Assistant Chief Engineer Vanessa is six feet of grease-smeared gorgeous, and Hermann would be an absolute moron not to notice. (He’s not made of stone, after all.) Her skin is dark, hair even darker and pulled tight in a bun behind her head, cheek splotched with oil and hands covered in grime. She pulls a fresh rag from her coveralls and does her best wiping away the Jaeger grease.

“Er-Engineer?” he asks.

“Call me Vanessa, please, no titles when I’m covered in goo. You are?”

“Ah- I’m uh, Gottlieb, Hermann Gottlieb, my apologies.”

  
  


**3\. Making History**

It’s a year of many events that will be put in the history books.

The Beckett brothers enlist in the Jaeger Academy, Tendo Choi enlists in the Jaeger Academy, the Shatterdomes in Vladivostok, Lima, Tokyo, and Anchorage are established, five Jaegers are launched; Diablo Intercept, Solar Prophet, Puma Real, and Eden Assassin.

Onibaba attacks Tokyo, Stacker Pentecost becomes the first person to solo-pilot a Jaeger when his copilot, Tamsin Sevier, collapses mid-battle.

Mako Mori becomes an iconic survivor, a photo of a little girl in a blue coat plastered across the news. Stacker Pentecost adopts this girl, the one he saved, doing what he can to save a life, when the life of the person closest to him begins to fail- Tamsin Sevier is diagnosed with Cancer.

A thousand and one things that will be in print forever, that will stream across webpages and autobiographies and newspapers and magazines for the rest of time.

It’s also a year of things that will never be read in the history books, but marked the beginning of something nonetheless.

Christmas in Anchorage, never having celebrated the holiday to begin with, having ignored Hanukkah since he left for University. He’s bundled in all his warmest jumpers, trying not to catch his death in the chilly Lab, when Vanessa tosses a huge, pea-green coat around his shoulders and pats him on the back.

“You look freezing, hang onto that one, why don’t you? Should have dressed properly for Alaska, Doctor Gottlieb.”

It won’t ever be in a history book, but Hermann Gottlieb smiles and thanks her, and he curls the coat tighter around himself.

  
  


**48\. Everyday Magic**

Hermann doesn’t believe in magic.

Those foolish men and women on the television who play with cards and metal rings, who do ridiculous stunts and tricks to get people to think there’s something special about the world they live in. Absolutely preposterous. He’s always been able to count the cards, never had any trouble seeing the sleight of hand and visual tip-offs that give away the trick. And that’s all they are, really, tricks. Magic isn’t real, magic doesn’t exist.

Newton thinks it’s funny, of course. Newton was an amateur magician in his youth, of course he was, and still carries around a deck of cards sometimes for when he needs something to do with his hands. He cuts the deck and then cuts it again and asks the other scientists to pick a card, any card, and they ooh and ahh every time their card gets revealed. Hermann rolls his eyes and Newt waggles the deck under his nose, grinning like a madman.

“C’mon, Hermann! Pick a card, I bet I can stump you!”

“Doubtful,” he always says, and turns back to his work.

Magic doesn’t exist. His father had told him that when he was just a boy, he’d know that his entire life.

Of course… as a boy he’d liked magic. He recalled taking Karla’s hand-me-down books, flipping through the pages of Harry Potter and enjoying it immensely, even remembered- though he would never let anyone know it- thinking he would like to go to Hogwarts. He would like to study magic.

He’d never admit it, never tell a single soul, nobody ever, that on his eleventh birthday he… maybe he woke up early in the morning and waited by the window. (His father caught him that night, sitting downstairs by the front door mail slot. He’d tried to explain, but that was when his father had told him magic didn’t exist, and Lars Gottlieb was never wrong, so, of course he believed him.)

The point was, magic was ridiculous. Tricks and lies, nonsense.

He does think, though, privately, that there is a certain sort of magic, in the metaphorical sense of course, that comes with certain things.

The way numbers line up just perfectly the first time, the way two people can pilot a giant mech because they trust one another, the way despite his and Newton’s eternal lack of friendliness they are the two most effective up and coming K-Science Officers in the PPDC… Vanessa’s glittering smile every time she passes him in the corridors.

Little things that aren’t really magic but certainly feel like a very close approximation.

 

**81\. A Place to Belong**

Newt’s never seriously felt like he belonged anywhere.

In primary school, growing up, he’d skipped so many grades and was doing so much better than his classmates, that they were intimidated by him. They didn’t talk to him, tried to avoid him. Those that didn’t saw his dinosaur shirts and light-up sneakers and laughed at him. He’d been a boy genius, a freaking prodigy, and kids are mean. Kids ignore and avoid and make fun because they don’t know how to handle different things, and that’s something Newt has always known.

It was better in college, still too young for a lot of things, but with people who could at least keep up with him. They at least valued him, asked for his input, and sure he couldn’t exactly go partying with them, but at least his brain was being stimulated like it had never been. ( _He liked college a lot, really, six doctorates after all._ ) But he’d never solidly BELONGED.

Even at the PPDC, doing his most amazing, important, fucking fantastic work, he hadn’t quite… fit. Kaiju groupie, whispers about fetish porn, murmurs about the tattoos in the same breath as they lauded his work.

He’s not an idiot, after all. He hears everything. Sees everything. Processes everything on a different speed from them.  

Working with Hermann and Hermann alone is the closest he gets to feeling like he’s found his place. Oh they fight like mad and they get on each others nerves, they strike sparks and they have fights in angry German that could level a small city. But sometimes they snicker at the same things, and sometimes their wit coincides, and sometimes, like a double helix, they overlap and it does amazing things. There is a bond there, after ten years on the job, and no matter how much they bicker, it’s not going away.

Post- Operation Pitfall, though… Post-Drift, that’s when things shift. His world tilts on his axis and suddenly Hermann is quietly asking him to be the Godfather to his child, and Newt, still drunk on the Drift, flashes back to Lake Como, mud between his toes, gutting a fish with his beloved Uncle Gunter. ( _Cyclical, life is cyclical, you bond with an uncle, you become an uncle in turn._ )

He says yes, of course, the Drift has changed them, and the double helix they create together is a bit tighter together, the distances between the gaps not so far. He has seen all of Hermann laid bare in a way that only his wife would understand, seen the fears and the anxieties and the remarkable capacity for poetry within science. He has seen HIMSELF laid bare from Hermann’s eyes, the rockstar scientist who doesn’t belong, and he’s sure the same goes for Hermann.

They shake hands, and somewhere along the next few weeks he just… follows Hermann back to London, gets a flat, tries to figure out what he wants to do with his life from now on. ( _Tissue replication has some kinks to work out, could maybe clone dinosaurs, always wanted to visit Jurassic Park. I could make that park work._ ) He’s there for little Rosalind Gottlieb’s birth, on April 1st, and he gets to hold his goddaughter and watch Hermann have conniption after conniption while Vanessa tells him to calm down. (“She’s not dying, Hermann, she’s a newborn and she’s hungry. Give her here, Newt.”)

He feels like he’s still Drifting, looking at the pages of his life and trying to find where the pieces match up, trying to find where he goes next.

His Uncle Gunter had inspired him a million times over, with music and fishing trips. He’d found solace in the Kaiju, in the monsters that he’d fantasized about as a child, and he had molded his life after those two things, above all else. Been inspired. The inklings of an idea come, but he still fears that nothing will ever satisfy him the way the Kaiju did.

Hermann and Vanessa’s home is where the seed gets planted, where the roots take hold, and from there he spreads out, weaves his way through the world and looks for the answers. Somewhere in his searching, in between helping with Rosalind and sleeping on the Gottliebs couch, in between tissue replication papers and experiments… He looks up and finds that he’s already found the answer.

He’s playing with Rosalind one day, that the idea comes to him.

Teaching, he’d loved teaching. But maybe not teaching college kids, no, no maybe teaching younger kids. Maybe… He’s overqualified, but he starts teaching primary school kids, and in many ways they are a thousand times more absurd than any Kaiju could ever be.

And at the end of the day, yes he’s got his flat he can return to, but more often than not… He finds his preferred place is on the Gottlieb’s couch, with Hermann's nagging and Vanessa's eyerolling, with Rosa's babbling and a house that smells like baby powder and chalk and perfume.

It’s not long before their basement is converted into his room, and the couch is ousted for his bed.

That's about as close to belonging as he feels he will ever get, and he really... really likes it.

 

**83\. Breakfast**

Until she started staying with Hermann, Vanessa had never really been a breakfast person.

Coffee, maybe a piece of toast here and there, she’d never quite managed to succeed as someone who ate a good breakfast and started the day. She liked to sleep in, and skipping breakfast was easy since she often wasn’t hungry in the mornings anyway, so it all sort of just… worked in her favor. When she’d started staying with Hermann, he woke with the sun and was almost immediately in the kitchen, kettle on the stove and breakfast being made. He was a meticulous man in many ways, and breakfast was no exception; egg on toast, bacon, waffles, sausages, jams and margarine and fresh fruit, every morning it was something different, something delicious, something that she could smell from the bed and wake up, and wander into the kitchen at her leisure to find.

He never forced her to eat breakfast, but he always offered, and whenever she declined he looked rather put-out about it.

Hermann is the only man she’s ever been with that made a bit of a to-do about making her breakfast after they’d spent the night together.

Eventually, she starts picking off his plate, pieces of toast, globs of jam, nibbles of bacon, slices of grapefruit, until every morning what they do is they just share a plate. Together, they clear it, and the day feels fresher, she feels more awake, more brilliant.

Years later, after they find habit and routine, and he goes to Hong Kong and they try to find moments together through time zones and phone calls, breakfast doesn’t happen as often as it used to. She doesn’t wake up to home cooked foods, and Hermann isn’t there for the early morning sickness she experiences while pregnant. She doesn’t have his talent for breakfast foods, and often burns the bacon, often gets frustrated when the toast isn’t quite golden brown the way he toasts it.

But every morning, she wakes up to a tiny message on her phone or computer, a line or two on a screen of ‘Don’t forget to eat breakfast. I will call you this evening. I love you.’

So she keeps trying, and even though the toast is a little burnt and the eggs are a bit runny, she feels the baby calm with every bite, and tries to remind herself that someday Hermann will be making breakfast for all three of them.

He has to.


End file.
